


Nowhere Land

by Bryony (REBB)



Category: Gundam Wing
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Gen, Unspecified Setting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-21
Updated: 2018-06-21
Packaged: 2019-05-26 13:17:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15001700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/REBB/pseuds/Bryony
Summary: The sky was clear and cold today, the brittle blue of winter. The only cloud was the ominous column of smoke that dictated their direction.





	Nowhere Land

**Author's Note:**

> Time to do some more crossposting while I'm still thinking of it! A relatively recent one from May 2017. Basically an AU Episode 12.

It was nearing dusk when Sally caught sight of movement on top of the hill. She stood still a moment, squinting upwards. It was definitely a person up there, a tiny two-legged black silhouette against an overcast sky. She could see whoever it was moving around against a backdrop of clouds just a few shades lighter than the figure was.

She didn't try to run or hide. There was no cover for miles around. Her tent was already set up for the night. She wouldn't break camp for this; there was nowhere else to go.

After only a few minutes, the person disappeared.

She wasn't too concerned. Well, she was, but there was no point in dwelling on it. If she was lucky, nothing would come of it at all. And if she wasn't, more than one person before now had made the mistake of underestimating her. And if she _really_ wasn't lucky, well, then she wouldn't be escaping anyway.

So Sally sat out for a while, her rifle sitting across her lap, ready for her. All was silence. The person on the hill might not have seen her; her tent wasn't made to stand out and she was camped in the shadowed lee of the hill that got dark first. Or, it was possible the person had seen her and decided to avoid her. After all, what sane person liked to risk confrontation these days? Then again, maybe they just hadn't reached her yet. It was a steep climb, slow going, especially in the increasing twilight. Or they could be biding their time.

When it got too dark for her to see, she turned in. Nights were getting cold and there was a hint of frost in the air. There was no point in sitting freezing, waiting for something that might never come. But she kept her rifle near. Sound carried out here. You could hear the burble of a stream a mile away. She'd have to rely on that, on instinct to wake her if the need arose.

Nothing disturbed her in the night. She woke in the pre-dawn with the birds, lay still and listened, like she did every morning. Nothing. If the birds weren't worried, then nor would she. She moved reluctantly in the chill, drank a cup of water from her pack, then went to relieve herself. When she came back, a man was standing by her tent. She immediately stopped in her tracks, calling out, "Who are you?"

The stranger met her gaze head on, his chin raised up a bit to look down his nose at her. He definitely saw her rifle, but it didn't seem to concern him. "Who's asking?" he returned.

She took a minute to look him up and down, then told him, "My name is Sally." She could be the first one to offer trust. She was used to that, she didn't mind it. "You're hurt?"

He bristled, shifted to look just a little more threatening. "No."

Liar. He tried to hide it, but she could see it in the way he stood; the way he was favoring one leg. "You should let me take a look. I'm trained as a medic."

"I'm fine," he sneered, "I don't need help."

"You came down here to rob me, then?" He carried nothing with him but the clothes on his back. It would make sense he wanted to rob her, but good luck to him if he tried. Sally still had her rifle.

He narrowed his eyes at her. She lifted her chin and returned the stare.

It might have turned into a stand off but for the fact that a plane came into earshot at that moment.

"Get down!" Sally shouted. Without thinking, she tackled him to the ground. "Keep still," she hissed in his ear when he threatened to buck her off; reluctantly, he settled. She turned an eye to the sky. She couldn't see anything, but she could still hear it, the whine of an engine overhead. Probably a troop carrier, she decided, flying above the level of the clouds. It would be en route somewhere, not scanning the ground looking for strays. Still, just to be safe, she lay there until she couldn't hear it anymore. That was the trouble with planes. You could never be sure. By the time you heard them they might have already spotted you.

She shifted off to one side and let the stranger sit back up. "So now that we've gotten to know each other," she joked, "why don't you let me take a look at that leg?" He glared, but she didn't wait for him to protest, taking his foot in her hands and gently easing off his boot. He didn't flinch or make a sound as she probed the swelling and rotated the ankle back and forth. "How long have you been walking on this?" she asked.

"A day or two," he answered grudgingly. "Not long."

"It's only a sprain, but it should be elevated. You should keep off of it for a couple of days, give it time to heal."

"You expect me to do _that_ out _here_?"

It was a fair point, which she acknowledged with a crooked smile. If their positions had been reversed, Sally would have tried to press on, too. She sat back on her heels. "It'll be okay with two people. I'll help you out. We can stay camped out here til you're back on your feet."

He looked at her with apparent horror. "I don't even know you."

"You'd rather I pack up and leave you?"

"I'm not looking for charity." But he looked away first when she met his eye.

She grunted, satisfied. "You might not have been looking for it, but it's what you've found. You can always run off and get yourself killed tomorrow if you decide that's what's best. I'll even promise not to mourn you if you want."

"I don't have anything," he warned her; she shrugged.

"I figured. Even so… It's still probably best not to be alone out here."

She had him get settled in the tent, used her pack to prop up his foot, tried to think what the hell she was going to do with herself the rest of the day if she wasn't on the move.

"It's risky to stay here, you know," he said. Like she didn't know. "That plane might have seen us."

And what she wouldn't give to be dug in behind an anti-aircraft gun, protective sandbags piled up around them. A proper camp. A team. It would just be an illusion of security, maybe, but sometimes that was all you needed. Or maybe she'd just been braver, then.

It didn't matter. Those days were over.

"We'll deal with it," she told him.

She scanned the sky, saw nothing but cloud.

"That was you last night, right?" she asked. "Up on top of that hill?"

For a minute she thought it was going to be another useless question, that he wasn't going to answer her. But then he told her, "Yeah. It was me." A crumb's worth of progress.

"Is that when you hurt your foot? Tricky climbing, in the dark." Silence. "You see anything from up there?"

"Just some idiot woman camped out all alone. In a government tent."

She snorted. "Har, har. I'm just wondering if it's worth my going up there, getting a decent vantage point in case anyone approaches." She could immediately tell, just by the quality of the silence, he didn't like the idea. For someone so unwilling to tell her anything about himself, her guest wasn't exactly subtle. "I don't have to."

"Whatever you think is best."

"All right then. In that case, I'll go." He seemed affronted, like he'd assumed that because she'd decided to take him in that meant he'd somehow be in charge. Well, it was best he got _that_ idea out of his head right away. She shifted his foot slightly so she could fish out the binoculars that were inside her pack. "I know you said you didn't have anything, but not even a knapsack? Rations? What have you been living off of?"

He sighed. "I have a small pack of rations. I stowed it earlier this morning."

"Well, if you tell me where it is I'll pick it up for you on my way back." At the cagey look on his face, she added, "I won't look through it or anything. You have my word." His continued hesitance let her know just how much that was worth. It was an effort not to roll her eyes. As if she wasn't the one taking the real risk here.

"Fine," he said at last, and gave her a brief description of where to find the bag. She nodded.

"I'll see you in a few hours."

"Don't make me come looking for you!" he called after her.

"Wouldn't dream of it," she muttered.

It stayed cloudy all day. Sally wished it would rain. She wouldn't mind topping up her water supply, and rainwater would be her preferred source. She didn't entirely trust the streams around here: too much farming runoff, for a start, between the agriculture off to the north and free roaming livestock elsewhere. And then, these days, who knew if there might not be a corpse or two rotting somewhere upstream, fouling everything up. She had a supply of purification tablets, but she was inclined to hoard them. Rainwater was safe enough to let her save them for any instances down the road when she might really need them. Today, she was out of luck: the clouds stayed in place, hanging low overhead, but on the ground it stayed bone dry.

Her self-imposed lookout duties didn't amount to much, either. Other than her own unassuming tent, there was no sign of anyone in the surrounding area. Bearing in mind the ease with which she had spotted her unexpected guest last night, she kept low to the ground, hugging the scree rock which formed the summit of the hill, but it seemed there was little need for such precautions. She'd attained the highest elevation for miles around, which offered a wide-reaching view of the surroundings. There weren't even any trees to break up the view: it was all scrub grass and dwarf shrubbery as far as the eye could see. Over the course of the day she saw three rabbits, a hawk, and a clutch of songbirds. That was it.

She ate some jerky and nuts for lunch at the summit, then headed back down later in the afternoon. She had nothing to report, which so far as she was concerned was a good thing. If the plane that morning had flown past without spotting them that was all to the good.

She found the stranger's pack without too much difficulty, hidden under a bush with a few stones piled nearby to mark the spot. She wondered if he'd even be grateful for it. Not likely, if his attitude that morning was anything to go by, but it would at least keep him from using up too many of her own resources. Hopefully. Curse her and her too kind heart. Nevertheless, it was true, what she'd told him: it was best not to be alone out here, even if that meant falling in with companions who weren't entirely trustworthy themselves.

"All quiet," she announced on her arrival back at the campsite. "And here?"

"Likewise," was the answer from within the tent.

"How's the ankle?"

"Fine."

They subsided into silence for a while. Sally examined her guest from the mouth of the tent. She tried to be subtle about it, but really, with just the two of them in such close quarters, she couldn't avoid being obvious. She guessed he was a few years her junior. Not that he had a particularly youthful attitude or anything. Going by the expression in his eyes she'd guess he had seen even more than she had. Her judgment was based purely on the wispy moustache forming on his upper lip, the smoothness of his cheeks showing through patchy, half-hearted stubble.

"I know you don't trust me," she said eventually, "and that's fine. But it might help if I had something to call you."

"Another approach might be that there's no point complicating things with names."

She snorted a laugh. "Or you could look at things that way," adding in a mutter, "the difficult way." He caught the aside and let out an amused snort of his own.

"Where are you headed, then?" she persisted.

"Nowhere."

"Nowhere, hmm? Well, congratulations: you've arrived." There was no acknowledgment of the joke this time. "I'm trying to go home," she offered. The admission made her feel distinctly vulnerable: a creeping sensation across the back of her neck. She hurried on. "So this morning, you weren't worried I might shoot you?"

"You're a woman. You don't have it in you to be that brutal."

"Huh. I get the feeling that's supposed to be an insult, but you make it sound so much like a compliment." He craned his neck to meet her eye and she smirked at him. For the first time, he smiled back. "Were you really going to try to rob me?"

Solemnly, he shook his head. She counted it as progress.

That night, they slept head to foot in the tent. It was cramped as anything, but it wasn't a bad thing having another person's body warmth in there.

The next day, they saw smoke in the sky. Sally caught her breath at the sight, her heart lodged in her throat. She went back up the hill again with her binoculars to scope it out as best she could. It was as productive an exercise as it had been yesterday. Whatever was going on, it was going on over the horizon. She saw nothing.

When she got back, they argued over whether or not they should go check it out.

"It's almost certainly related to that plane from yesterday," she said. "We don't know what we'd be walking into."

"Do what you want," he told her, "I'm going."

Bastard. She sighed, passed a hand over her face in resignation. "Not alone you're not."

They broke camp and set out the next morning. The sky was clear and cold today, the brittle blue of winter. The only cloud was the ominous column of smoke that dictated their direction. Sally taped up the stranger's ankle for him, pleased to see the swelling was down. She didn't know if he was just trying to hide it from her, but he walked with barely a limp.

She occupied herself over the trek with thoughts of who her strange new traveling companion could be. He didn't wear a uniform. (Neither did she. Yet she slept in a government-issue tent.) He didn't seem to carry a weapon, either. He might merely be someone displaced by the fighting, which could explain his lack of supplies, but she didn't think he had the air of a civilian. Despite his youth, she thought he might be a government soldier. They were recruiting young these days. He could be a deserter. That would explain his lack of uniform or weapon, as well as his reluctance to reveal anything about himself.

If he was with the government, that could interfere with her own self-interest, down the line. Potentially as soon as when they arrived at their destination, depending on what they found there. Sally wasn't sure what the kid was expecting, but she was walking with a stone in the pit of her stomach. They were hardly likely to find anything useful, but they could sure find themselves landing in a deathtrap, between any survivors they encountered, the occupying forces, or anyone like themselves, drawn in by the lure of the smoke; that false promise of easy pickings.

It took another day and a half for them to get there. In that time, her traveling companion spoke barely a word. She wasn't particularly inclined toward conversation herself. His rudeness irritated her. The fact they were going this way at all irritated her. She still didn't even know his damn name, he disdained her every argument and attempt at tempered advice -- she was the only one bringing anything to the table, and yet, for some reason, she was the one following _him_ on this bullheaded charge? But it wasn't in her to let him go off unsupervised. (How long would he really survive without her? He didn't even have a tent!) She'd decided to repair this stranger's ankle and somehow taken on responsibility for his future safety at the same time. She supposed that was the problem with healing people; you couldn't stand to see them go and stupidly throw it all away afterwards.

They could smell it when they finally started getting close, the acrid tang of the smoke they'd followed all this way. Sally unstrapped her rifle from her pack and began to carry it at the ready, scanning and re-scanning the featureless landscape without pause as they walked. She trusted nothing about this place.

And then they arrived.

The burned out camp appeared first as a black smudge in front of them, then slowly sharpened in focus as they grew closer. The smoke seemed to have the effect of smothering all sound; Sally could hear nothing but their own footfalls. It was eerie approaching without the background chirp and whistle of birds calling to each other or the whine of insects. It was not just that something devastating had recently happened here, but that life itself appeared to have abandoned this place in its wake.

"Is this what you wanted to find?" she whispered to her companion. The young man spared her a look. He seemed as ill at ease as she was.

Without needing to discuss it, they began to systematically take stock of the camp. Sally had been in a place like this, once. A couple of semi-permanent structures, just metal trailers set up on cinderblocks, presumably used to serve as command posts. And there were the dug in defenses, sandbagged just like she'd been used to. No anti-aircraft guns that she could see, though. Stripped, presumably. Her place had come to a similar end.

Everything useful, it seemed, had been dragged into the center of the camp and torched. Electronics, rucksacks, tents, rations. Maps. They probably would have been the first thing to go, she thought sourly.

It hadn't just been bombed, then. There had been soldiers here on the ground. She thought again of the plane that had flown overhead. If this had indeed been its destination, there was no indication of it having landed anywhere nearby. If its troops had parachuted down and been left, where were they now? Perhaps they had absconded in the convenient all terrain vehicles which may or may not have once been here, but which for a certainty were now conspicuously absent.

They checked the buildings, such as they were. No sign of anyone.

"There are no bodies," Sally observed. "There's not even any blood. No sign of any fighting at all. Did the people who were camped here destroy this place themselves?"

"It's a good question. I wish I knew the answer."

The other possibility that occurred to her was that there had never been anyone here at all. It wasn't unheard of, was it? Propaganda like that was rife. A fake rebel camp, built and destroyed by government forces to make it look like they were not only fighting, but winning. But if you were going to set up something like that, there had to be someone around to see it. And here, there was only the pair of them. For now, at least. Uneasy again, Sally glanced over her shoulder. Nobody. Of course. Even so, she wanted to leave. The sooner the better.

"There's nothing here," she said.

"We haven't looked that closely yet," her anonymous companion argued without care. She glowered at his back.

He vanished back into one of the trailers. She turned her attention to the exterior. Round the back, she found the potable water storage tanks. For the first time since arriving, her hopes surged. She shrugged off her pack and went to unscrew the lid, crossing her fingers that she wouldn't find it empty.

Worse: fouled.

"Damn it!" She slammed the lid back down in frustration.

At a sound behind her, she turned, expecting to find her young companion rejoining her. Instead, it was a stranger -- another one -- in a uniform she didn't recognize. Stifling her startled gasp, instantly on guard, she raised her rifle. "Identify yourself," she demanded.

The man smiled at her. It was not a friendly smile. Spreading his arms wide as if to show them to be empty, he said something in a language she didn't understand and took a step towards her.

"Stay back there," Sally warned him, ice in her voice. "I said _identify yourself_."

He said nothing, just stood there grinning at her. An attempt to look disarming, she thought.

She wasn't an idiot. This man was going to try to kill her: it was all over his face. What's more, he actually thought he could take her -- even though she was the one holding a gun. Well, maybe he was right. After all, she had no intention of using it -- at least, not to shoot him.

Shifting her grip on the weapon, she charged him, intent on taking him down before he could properly react. She'd caught him off guard; his attempt to block her was clumsy. She rammed him with the butt of the rifle. He stumbled, doubled over; she grabbed him by the hair, brought his face down into her knee. He cried out, collapsed down onto all fours. She hit him with the rifle again, bringing it sharply against the back of his head. He sprawled down into the dirt.

She looked up to see the kid. It seemed he'd come running when he'd heard the commotion. She lifted the corner of her lip in a half smile, just enough to let him know she was all right. "We should get moving," she told him. He actually nodded -- he agreed with her! A miracle.

"What do you want to do about him?" He indicated the man she'd just dispatched.

She sighed, nudging him with the toe of her boot. "Just leave him. He's not worth the rope it would take to tie him up. Did you find anything useful?"

He shoved past her, knelt down by the unconscious man, came back up with a small radio. "I have now. Are you sure about just leaving him here? He could have other people with him."

Sally felt suddenly tired. She wasn't sure about anything, in fact. "He doesn't even have a gun," she pointed out. "I think he's alone out here, just like we are." Leaving him behind was surely death sentence enough. They gave the camp one last sweep before they began walking. "Did you hear what that man was saying?" she asked. "He was foreign."

The boy -- she shouldn't call him that; he was only a few years younger than her at most -- looked over at her. "Where from?"

"I don't know. I couldn't tell." She didn't like the implications, though. A foreign soldier in her home country, in uniform? It suddenly lent yet another disturbing possibility to what had happened back at that camp. "You never heard anything? About the government inviting foreign allies in? Anything like that?"

"No," he said flatly in response to her fishing, and turned his attention to the radio.

Sally watched him flick it on and scroll quickly through the available frequencies. All static. What a surprise. He turned it off again. "How long are you planning to stay with me?" The question took her by surprise almost as much as it did him. She hadn't intended to say anything.

"You want me to go?"

He interrupted himself to look backwards. Sally turned to look, too. It was the soldier from the camp, following them at a distance. She frowned, fingered her rifle. Without a word to her, the boy suddenly began to run back towards him.

"Hey!" she shouted after him, startled.

He paid her no mind. Sally began to shrug out of her cumbersome pack and give chase, cursing to herself the while. She wasn't sure what she hoped to do. The kid was quicker than her, and he had a head start. The soldier saw him coming and fell into a defensive stance. He wasn't going to be taken unawares this time. Damn it.

But it wasn't the kid she need have worried about. She fell momentarily still with shock as they began to fight. He arrived -- the kid, her…comrade -- he arrived like a thunderclap, dropping low to the ground and immediately delivering a sweeping kick that knocked his opponent's legs out from under him. The soldier went down with a cry and the boy followed him, relentless. She didn't know what she'd been expecting -- that he'd be helpless or something? -- but it wasn't this, this savagery. This was unnecessay.

"Hey!" she shouted at him again, moving in to pull them apart.

Too late.

The glint of a knife jumped into the soldier's hand. The kid saw it, too, saw it coming for him. He grabbed the soldier by the wrist. In the next moment the knife was in his own hand, and then it was buried deep in the soldier's neck. Sally felt herself go immediately into triage mode, although here there was only one wound, one patient. "Get out of the way," she snapped at the boy, shoving him aside to crouch at the dying man's side, moving to try to stem the bleeding. He gurgled up at her.

He didn't think himself so tough, now, did he? She bent over him. Let him see a friendly face before he died. She looked at the fear in his eyes with sympathy, the same fear she'd seen a hundred times in a hundred different people. It was always the same. "Be at peace now," she whispered to him. She felt his hand reach out and clutch at her briefly, before it went limp. The light faded slowly from his eyes.

She turned her gaze onto the kid. He was on his feet where she'd pushed him, looking at her with a mix of anger and bewilderment. "That man was an enemy. He tried to kill us, yet you still try to save him?"

"I'm a medic. I told you." He wasn't the only one who was angry. Let him think on that for a while. "How many people have you killed? This wasn't your first time, I don't think."

"You going to banish me or something if you don't like my answer?"

The words were a taunt, but there was something in the way he said them, staring off over her shoulder instead of looking her in the eye, that let her know she'd hit a sore spot. She threw up her hands in defeat. "You're right. It doesn't matter. Let's just…bury this guy."

He didn't object to that, which was maybe the most she could ask for.

They did the best they could in the cold rocky ground, without a shovel between them. Sally had a small hatchet, which helped a little. Minimally. The hole was shallower than it should be. They had to arrange him on his side, curled into a fetal position to make him fit. When they'd covered him back with dirt, they piled all the stones they'd dug up on top of that, a couple of them large enough it took the both of them to lift them, but mostly tiny, fist-sized things. There would be animals at the carcass before too long, most likely, but it was the best they could do.

They sat for just a few minutes more, while the afternoon continued to creep on. They wouldn't be able to get much farther before they would have to stop for the night, but Sally couldn't bring herself to suggest camping here. No way.

"Hey," said the kid, quietly. She glanced over at him. "My name. It's Wufei."

"Wufei," she repeated. "Thank you for telling me."

He shifted uncomfortably. "I didn't want…to die out here like him, with no one knowing who I am."

"You won't," she assured him. "I won't let that happen." Even if it was only because now she knew who he was. Wufei seemed to have the same thought, because he looked at her with a knowing, cold-eyed smirk. There was very little a person could promise, out here. "Ready to move?"

He nodded; and aching, exhausted, they carried on.

Sally couldn't help but think about all the things she missed as they walked. Cooked meals. A warm bed. Red wine. And above all, hot running water. How she longed for a bath. Soon, she tried to tell herself. Soon. You're on your way home. But the truth was, she was guessing in the dark. She didn't have a map. The maps had burned when the people in her camp did. She was navigating by the broad principles of the sun rising in the east and setting in the west and the general sense of where home lay in relation to where she knew she'd been. So far, that did not appear to have gotten her very far. But they would have to reach a town eventually. A farmhouse, at least. Something. She'd never understood how wild and remote her homeland was until she was called on to walk across half its length.

They decided, when they stopped for the night, that they were still close enough to the burnt out campsite that they could risk a fire of their own, although Sally almost came to regret that decision when she realized how much additional work it would entail. The landscape had changed somewhat over the last couple of days, but not so very much that it had become a vast source of pre-chopped wood. She was grateful when Wufei took her hatchet and the responsibility for that particular task. After she pitched the tent, she did manage to lay a simple snare trap, which in due course yielded a struggling rabbit. That meant she could at least cross one thing off her list of desires. Hello, hot meal.

Wufei was fussing with the radio again when she returned with her catch. "Anyone out there?" she asked. He shook his head, looking frustrated. "May I?" He passed it over to her and she took her own slow trawl through the available channels, though unsurprisingly failed to find anything different. Just static. She mused, "If he'd been in communication with anyone I suppose he wouldn't have been stranded back at that camp. Then again, have you tried actually saying anything?"

"No. I don't think that's wise without knowing who's on the other end, first."

She switched the radio back off and set it down beside her. "We're just two people. You have to wonder how much they'd really care about us right now."

"A man alone can still be dangerous. Two people even more so."

Sally didn't feel like discussing it anymore. She took out her knife and set to work skinning the rabbit. The kid -- Wufei, she reminded herself, picked up on her mood -- or more likely, was in one of his own -- and made himself scarce.

It was cold and dark already, and she was exhausted. Her hands shook. The knife skittered over the rabbit and sliced suddenly deep into her hand. She hissed and pulled back, moving to examine the cut in the light of the fire. Blood welled in her palm. Her hands were still dirty from digging that grave. She hadn't been able to wash them properly. Stupid. There was another man's blood staining the cuffs of her shirt, too.

She told herself not to think about that. The first aid kit was in her pack in the tent. She should go get it. But her eyes would not move from the blood in her palm, on her sleeve. She thought suddenly she would be sick. Her lungs closed up.

She staggered to her feet and away from the camp.

She knew exactly what was happening to her. That did not make it any easier to get through. Her one thought was to get away, that she must not let him, Wufei, see her like this.

She counted her breaths. She _was_ breathing, although it didn't feel like it. Her heart was not, in fact, exploding in her chest, although her ribs seemed to grip it with an iron force. This was not death. This was not death. Not _her_ death, at least. Just that of a foreign soldier, who'd sought to kill her. And those of her comrades. The men of her squadron. The men that she'd healed. The men that she'd loved.

She made herself breathe slowly, calmly. Eventually, the attack passed and she was left, limp and shaky. She'd had them, periodically, since her camp burned, bombed by the government that they'd attempted to resist. There was no knowing what would set one off. Today, at least, that made sense.

Her skin felt stretched too tight and over-wrought, like a single touch would send her screaming. Her hand ached fiercely. Slowly, she found her feet and turned to set off back to camp. Stopped. Turned again, in a slow, full circle.

Panic of a different sort set in as she realized she could not see the light of the campfire and did not remember which way she'd come. "Idiot," she cursed herself. She hung her head and began to laugh, helplessly, hopelessly.

"What's so funny?" asked a cold voice. She gasped. Wufei. He'd found her. A surge of relief hit her that was so pure it made her legs wobble.

"Nothing. I'm just…glad to see you is all." She began laughing again, louder, couldn't stop herself.

"What are you doing out here?"

"Nothing," she said again, unable to think of a credible lie. She did not sound convincing, even to herself.

Wufei's voice was still cold, tense, which should have been a warning to her. He crossed to her, got right in her face, pointed at her with an angry hand. "Were you meeting someone?"

She could only stare at him, bemused. "No-"

" _Who was it_?" he hissed, genuinely threatening as his anger grew. "Where are they now?"

It took some time for her to realize, he thought she'd used the radio to contact someone. She knew his name now, and he thought she was betraying him. "Wufei," she said gently, "there's no one. You're safe. We're…both safe."

He stilled, then demanded in an altogether different, but still suspicious voice, "What happened to your hand?"

She looked at it again. It was hard to see much in the dark, but she could tell it was still bleeding, sluggishly. Her forearm to the elbow was covered in a streaky dark stain. It was sticky wet. "The rabbit- the knife slipped," she said dumbly. She raised her eyes to his. "I had a panic attack. I get them, sometimes. I didn't want you to know. I was embarrassed."

He let out his breath and something in him appeared to deflate with it. He believed her. "You're weak," he told her. But the way he said it, it sounded almost affectionate.

"Watch out, now," she warned, "I might start to think you care."

He turned on his heel. "The camp is this way."

She followed him, and sure enough, the flicker of their fire soon pierced the darkness. "Thank you," she told him. "I could have been lost out there."

"You are a clever woman. I'm sure you would have made it back in one piece. You did not go far."

"Sometimes it only takes one moment of carelessness."

"That is true."

He was so matter of fact, she found herself wondering again just who he was, this boy. Who had he been so afraid she'd contact? She opened her mouth to ask, and then shut it again. It didn't matter. The people they'd been before, that didn't matter now. Knowing would only make things harder.

Wufei fetched out the first aid kit and sat with her while she bent over her hand.

"You asked, earlier, how long I plan to stay with you," he said at length.

"Please, forget about that. I was just annoyed. It doesn't matter."

He fell silent for a while. Then added, "You said you were planning to go home."

"If I can still find it." Her chest clenched again, just a little. "It might be weak, but… My family. My home. They're the things I want to fight to protect, now. They're the _only_ things I want to fight for."

"I will fight for them, too." Startled, she looked up at him. He accepted her gaze calmly, no unease detectable in him. For the first time since she'd met him, he seemed completely earnest: no bluster, no false machismo. "I will accompany you home, and together we will fight to protect it. Sally."

"But why would you do that?"

"Because… when I met you, I had lost my way. Now I have found it again. You have reminded me that even the weak can be strong, and I am grateful."

She nodded without really understanding. "I'm not sure if I know the way, either."

"We will find it." He sounded certain. She smiled, accepting this, drawing strength from it. It would be good, she thought, to be a part of a team again. Maybe it would only be the illusion of security, but then again, sometimes that was all you needed.

Later that night, she got her wish, when it began to rain.


End file.
